Bird vs. Fish

Birding w/my iPhone

In these days of tech addiction, it seems always a struggle to balance how much I should use my iPhone! “Modern day birding” is no help. 🙂 In fact, it’s the main reason I can’t justify deleting social media from my phone. Ironically, an activity that otherwise immerses us in nature is wrapped up in […]

Burlington Bay: Lake View Park & WTP

Today I fought my cold and went birding in the rain and 50’s°F to look for a Pacific loon reported in the morning. Unfortunately I didn’t find it, but I did find a red-necked grebe on the lake. I walked down to the beach next to the water treatment plant and looked for rocks. After the rain picked up, […]

Some Tidbits (& Tid-Bytes?) for Linux

I use Google Drive through google-drive-ocamlfuse because it has a native mount, so it looks/acts much like the folder you’d be accustomed to on Windows. However, it’s much slower to sync, so be aware of that (i.e. it doesn’t do what the Windows side does, which is to make a folder and sync on its […]

Peak Fall Color Destinations in MN

I’ve been slacking on blogging lately so here’s a quick rundown of the places we’ve been in search of fall colors this month! Temperance River state park Tettegouche state park: shovel point Palisade head Jay Cooke State Park white pine trail (1-4) C.C.C. trail (4 –> 1) Oldenburg overlook picnic trail overlook

Google Earth Image Exporting for Download

We were breaking apart our region of interest to facilitate downloads, but I decided instead to let Google tile the image for me. Some things I noticed: even when providing a region for export, the extent is used as opposed to an actual “clip” of the image. However, when you clip the image earlier in […]

Review: Peterson Field Guides Birding by Ear (Eastern/Central)

The 1st disc starts with a “dawn chorus” that is also a nice little quiz once you work your way through the CD’s! The credits mention that it is taken from an album for which I can’t track down an electronic recording, but it has been generated from more recordings than that, based on a […]

Brightest Ray Aurora I’ve Ever Seen!

A CHHSS produced the brightest ray aurora I’ve ever seen right at nightfall! As soon as it got dark enough (but before total dark), we could start to see the aurora in the northern sky, so we knew it was going to be good. As it got darker, the green light only got brighter! We […]

Exploring Alseth Rd., Stony Point

Like many southern St. Louis Co. roads, it’s lined with reed canary grass which gives way to speckled alder before interfacing with the native habitat, if there is any. In this case, there’s a spruce/tamarack swamp on the west side of the road near the intersection with the scenic byway, with many barren trees.

What I’m Doing in Google Earth Engine

Right now, there’s a data set we want that’s distributed exclusively on Earth Engine. So, to break it into manageable/meaningful chunks for our analysis, we’ve created regions. We basically need to generate the raster (requires a “max” function for the time period of interest) for each year, and then clip the raster to each region […]

Bird Common Names Derived from Indigenous Languages

There are a few bird names that were given by Indigenous cultures of the Americas that have made their way to our current common names. North American dowitcher sora Nahuatl chachalaca quetzal pauraque? South American condor anhinga caracara jacana ani tanager jabiru